Movie review: 'The Trip'

Call it a weepy for the gay community: "The Trip" is an oddly marketed, oddly titled romance. Yes, there is a trip, but it takes place during the last 15 minutes of the film and seems almost tangential.

Moviegoers passing this film's poster (which shows two strapping young men posing on the hood of a car, divided by a slinky girl) might think it's a road-trip movie fueled by a standard love triangle. They'd only be one-third right. In actuality, the young lady (Sirena Irwin) in the skimpy leopard-print dress and knee-high boots gets relatively little screen time. The two male characters are Tommy (Steve Braun), a handsome gay activist who inspires young Republican writer Alan (Larry Sullivan) to come out of the closet.

Writer/director Miles Swain's story begins in Los Angeles in 1973, when Alan and Tommy meet at an after-hours house party. Unbeknownst to Alan, it's a gay house party, but before leaving, he meets Tommy, whom he asks to dinner for an interview for a book. Tommy, however, thinks it's a date.

From there, "The Trip" leaps forward years at a time to different stages of Alan and Tommy's relationship. But there's a hitch. While the pair played cat-and-mouse early in their romance, Alan poured his frustrations into an anti-gay expose book - which is published years later, against his wishes.

So, OK, the fact that tightly wound Alan might be gay is easy enough to believe. A lot has been said about gay-bashing being a form of self-denial. But Swain asks us to believe that a book could be released without a living author's approval - without even his name attached. (The book is published with an anonymous byline.) That's just one of the "aw, come on" narrative leaps "The Trip" makes.

Worse, this boy-meets-boy story falls too hard on boy-meets-girl conventions, right down to a tepid love triangle and an operatic star-crossed relationship.

Thankfully, "The Trip" is bolstered by some witty dialog and at least one magnetic actor (Braun), even if writer/director Miles Swain casts him in a Brad Pitt mold. In some dippy '70s wigs, Swains' characters verbally duck and move, banking on the sort of humor that's made "Will & Grace" a sitcom hit.

For example, when Tommy first meets Alan's fiancée, Beverly (Irwin), he charms her to pieces, even though he thinks he's on a date with Alan.

Beverly: "So, Alan tells me you're a homosexual."

Tommy: "Only because there was nothing good on television."

Beverly: "Well, I just find it so intriguing."

Tommy: "Not always. Liberace, for example."

Beverly: "Liberace is a homosexual?"

Tommy: "Sadly, yes."

And sadly, the peppy originality ends there and schlock takes over. At one point, one character actually bursts into tears and says, "I never got a chance to tell you how much I love you!" - after which we expect the theme from "Days of our Lives" to play. It never happens, although it wouldn't be out of line, given the movie's tone.

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